Update: Jeff Kaufman posted a great and thoughtful comment, and I've now updated towards this not being actually worth doing. I'm leaving this post up because deletion is probably worse, but I no longer endorse the core recommendation of this post. I continue to endorse the third paragraph, proposing we further decrease the rate at which community posts show up on frontpage.
I want to propose a common-sense reform to the EA forum - stop any post tagged "Community" from showing up in Google searches. (I believe this to be technically implementable; this not being true would be good reason not to implement this change). I think it's probably good for EA discourse right now to be able to talk about scandals etc. openly but also have, like, minimum moats preventing some of the lowest effort bad-faith targeting by external parties.
The important parts of the EA forum to people who are Googling us are, like, the things that we object-level care about! The actual stuff that the majority of EAs in direct work do every day—distributing insecticide-treated antimalarial bednets, or doing research in AI alignment, or figuring out how to make vaccines in advance for the next pandemic. There are status and incentive gradients to write about and upvote community stuff on the EA forum, but we can counter that at least somewhat by removing it from search engines!)
[Edit: I continue to endorse this paragraph]. I also, for similar reasons, think that we should further decrease the default rate at which community posts show up on the frontpage, perhaps going as far as to mark community posts as Personal Blog by default. I think they make discourse norms worse and having the frontpage full of object-level takes about the world (which in fact actually tracks what most people doing direct EA work are actually focused on, instead of writing Forum posts!) is better for both discourse norms and, IDK, the health of the EA community. (This is not a hill that I want to die on, but feels like a relevant extension).
Finally, I find myself instinctively censoring myself on the Forum because anything I say can be adversarially quoted by a journalist attempting to take it out of context. There's not a lot I can do about that, but we could at least make it slightly harder for discussion amongst EAs that often require context about EA principles and values and community norms to be on the public internet.
What does "targeting" mean? I could see it being good to have a higher karma threshold for commenting on Community posts, so it's harder for e.g. non-EAs to pretend to be EAs, people to create multiple sockpuppet accounts to skew discussion in a Community post, etc. (Not saying this has happened already on the EA Forum, just noting this as an obvious sort of thing that could happen.)
On the other hand, if "targeting" means people on other sites discussing EA Forum stuff, I disagree. IMO the goal of moats should be to make EA Forum discussion better, not to make it hide particular EA Forum posts. (As a beleaguered MIRI employee, I warn you: Beware the Streisand effect!)
No? That's the stuff that we wish were important to them. The things people actually want to know are more diverse than that, and probably do skew more toward juicy scandals than toward the things EAs wish people were more interested in.
If we want to override that preference, then we can choose to do so. But let's not lie to ourselves about why we're doing it.
I agree with this. I bid that you die on this hill instead, not on the other one. :P
That makes total sense to me. I'd suggest that rather than hiding parts of the EA Forum, we just make a new forum that's designed from the start to be more casual and insider-y. That could include search engine pessimization, as well as "only vetted EAs in good standing can post or comment", as well as "the vetting system allows EAs to post pseudonymously, have multiple accounts, etc." Heck, even small things like not having the word "EA" in the forum's name may help people feel more comfortable being candid.
(I'm not bidding that this hypothetical new forum hide the fact that it's EA-ish. I'm just imagining it serving a similar function to something like Dank EA Memes, where it's branded as a less official and important sort of thing, so people feel more comfortable just chatting casually, shitposting, being candid, etc.)
(And I'm not bidding that this thing replace the EA Forum. I just think it can be useful to try out multiple sorts of forums and see what norms, culture, rules, etc. work best. Centralizing everything on a single forum isn't actually the best approach, IMO.)